I’m saying that anyone singling out Apple for planned obsolescence and disregarding the rest of the market is playing into someone’s playbook.

I’m also fully aware of the so-called batterygate (oh, how I loathe how people add a “gate”-suffix to things to make a “scandal” completely clueless to the fact that Water_gate_ was the name of a fucking hotel. Anyways…), and while we may only speculate wether or not Apple was trying to push people to buy new phones, from appearances it would seem that they were acting in the (somewhat*, I’ll get back to that later) best interest of the consumers, but just failing to communicate it in a good manner.

1. Before the story broke people discovered that replacing batteries made the devices run faster again.
2. Before Apple started power/performance-throttling devices with worn batteries plenty of older iPhones exhibited shutdown issues, especially at lower SoC. I remember being clueless as to why some devices among friends and family behaved this way. After Batterygate broke it suddenly clicked.
3. Built-in batteries can be replaced for a reasonable price either via Apple (less reasonably), or via a third-party (more reasonably). Device experience is regained (minus software bloat), and device longevity is maintained.

Now let me get back to my asterisk:

*: There are different types of battery chemistries, and while Apple thumped their own chests back in the day that their MacBook batteries took 1000 charge cycles to get to 80% of factory capacity.

Apple willingly choose to use cheaper chemistries for iPhone batteries than they could use if they wanted longevity to be higher.

So yes, in that regard you can argue planned obsolescence. The amount of money Apple charge for their phones they could definitely put better batteries in, but on the other hand there’s likely arguments for why they choose these batteries, such as capacity or other characteristics. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on battery chemistries, and will leave that to someone else.

With regards to some of your comments on longevity then and now; note that we used to use the best material to make something, regardless of its impact on people and environment. Some environmental concerns do actually reduce product longevity.

Combined with increased technological complexity and a higher rate of improvement in the digital era than in the analog era it’s been a long period where don’t think it’s too bad to replace a device after a few years time.

However, we’re now seeing so good performance from a lot of our tech products that an upgrade feels much more incremental than it used to.

I definitely think we should demand more lifetime from our products, but this needs to be through regulation and not just left to consumers.

• Software needs to be supported and updated so that the devices can be used safely
• Parts need to be available for replacement.
• Soldering components with limited lifespan to the motherboard should be illegal without providing a backup port and room for a replacement device, at least over a certain form factor. Thinking of SSD’s primarily.

Louis Rossmann also had some good points here: https://youtu.be/l27_75pDvd4

We should be able to use cloud features without being locked to the manufacturer. Especially if they go belly-up.

He mentions a Chinese car manufacturer, and Arlo cameras, but it could just as well be Norwegian EV charge box manufacturer Easee, or a cell phone manufacturer like RIM (BlackBerry) or a TV manufacturer, etc.

So many products today depend on cloud services for basic functionality, and for a lot of those devices their planned obsolescence will be the cloud service they’re connected to.

Should Apple support their products longer?

Yes, definitely.

But there’s a big difference between not supporting old devices with software updates and designing them to stop working which you allege to.

If you ask me theres way worse fish out there than Apple, and if you look at phone support Apple is the golden standard by a mile with most Android devices still not being supported for more than a year or two tops.

What we should have is a requirement to support devices for at least ten years.

Yes, I know, ten years is a long time, but we’ve gotten to a point where we should expect a device that’s been treated well to last that long.

My 2013 MBP runs just fine, so does my 2011 MBA, my dad’s Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from 2008 even still works. But only one of those is running an updated operating system. Guess which one?

Doesn’t mean that the product is designed to fail, just that Apple chose not to support them any longer.

Right. Keep pretending.

lol what? How do you think the world works? What kind of argument is that - at all? SMH

In my experience very varied. I feel students lean more towards Android, but if you develop on Mac you’re also more likely to have an iPhone, but the one place where it’s somehow been consistently Android in my team is the app developers.

While I don’t mind it at all, somehow the Android build of our app still has the most issues. Consistently over almost six years now. Which I find a bit ironic.

A friend of mine that was also a former colleague has always been an Android guy. A year ago he switched employer and the new company is iPhone only - but he can’t get the latest versions, and it’s basically just the base version too. So he’s still running with his Galaxy S21, but no e-mail or calendar sync.

I think he’d switch if he could put some of his own cash in and upgrade to the top model.

People can have the preference they want in life, but there’s no need to obnoxious about it.

“Known to scam people”, “designed to stop working”.

I am fully aware that people can say anything on the internet, but clearly you are not objective at all.

Obviously any further attempt at discussion is pointless. Enjoy your fruit-less life, may it treat you with software updates until the next flagship device is launched.

Honestly don’t know. Whenever I check back in on the few communities that I care about that didn’t find a new home on the fediverse (at least that I’ve seen) the rest of Reddit seems less engaged than before.

You almost had me there - until you claimed Apples business plan was to sell to stupid people.

No law against playing poker without looking at your cards. Chances are you’ll loose.

Your choice. Same with assuming what a topic is and arguing straw men.

The fact that you can audit it has zero value.

People don’t audit anything, and pretending that they do is hopeful at best, deceitful at worst.

Even if you audit it you are likely not understanding the code well enough to figure out if it is vulnerable.

Which leads back to my original point which thus still stands; there’s no smart way to choose non-vulnerable plugins. One can obviously avoid things that don’t meet certain standards (popularity, lines of code, known issues, how they’re resolved, etc.), but still doesn’t guarantee anything.

This means that your statement about “smart Wordpress sites don’t pick vulnerable plugins” is frivolous. May I suggest “smart Wordpress sites chooses plugins carefully and limits the amount to those strictly necessary, but should still pay attention to updates patching issues”. Because that’s the difference between smart and dumb. Dumb sites are just left running whatever they shipped with, PHP or not, and smart devs make sure to keep their system and/or CMS and plugins up date.

And if you still want to argue that people actually review the code they depend upon I have one word for you: Heartbleed.

“Smart WordPress sites”, now that’s an oxymoron!

But do please tell how you figure out if a plugin will be caught having a vulnerability or not.

I mean the one that was bad enough to bubble up on a front page on my phone ;)

Wasn’t there a funny little zero-day in a widely used Wordpress plugin just last week?

Most of the sysadmins I know have incredibly high tolerances for friction, but ridiculously low tolerances for repetitive tasks. Which I think is a bit ironic.

I’m not sure this crowd will be representative in terms of which tools and services they use (or prefer to use).

And they probably scan your surroundings and upload it to the cloud. Only thing creepier would be Amazon making the same thing and then sending you ads for stuff that goes with whatever they saw you had or replacements for old stuff you have.

Who would you elect after being displaced into the world’s largest prison by someone who took over your home 60 years ago?

Not defending the actions of Hamas, but such an outcome was more or less inevitable. Hate breeds hate.

Same MO as always. If you’re not with Israel (the country) you are anti-Semitic, have forgotten about the Holocaust (which you should feel ashamed of letting happen), and support terrorism.

Heck, sometimes someone comes to me and asks if some system can solve something they just thought of. Sometimes, albeit very rarely, it just works perfectly, no code changes required.

Not going to argue that my code is artificial intelligence, but huge AI models obviously has a higher odds of getting something random correct, just because it correlates.

Principally agree. If we want to make a dent we need to be going into carbon capture mode - as most likely we’re already seeing cascading effects from the emissions already caused. Permafrost melting and releasing methane, the ocean warming up and holding less CO2.

But the numbers you use are horrid.

The average EV weighs maybe around 300 kg more than a comparable fossil car. Sure, the Hummer EV weighs a fuckton, but a regular Hummer ICE isn’t exactly a Lotus either.

The other negative trend in weight is the SUV-ification of society, and if you swap a Civic for an iX you get double padding.

Lifetime emissions cast a much bigger shadow than production emissions and most EV’s are climate positive one year in (average driving length, average electricity mix).

All of that said; don’t buy an EV to save the planet. Buy an EV because it’s a better car and better for your wallet. Depending on a multitude of factors these may not hold true for you yet, and you should probably just keep driving what you drive.

People focus way too much on the downsides of EV’s like charging infrastructure issues or waiting to charge.

All vehicles have tradeoffs and just because you’re used to filling petrol doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant activity. I’ve spent way too much time freezing at the petrol pump in the winter.

I actually did the math and found I’ve been spending way too much time at the petrol pumps. Driving electric I plug in at home. Takes a few seconds just like plugging in your phone.

Going out for petrol takes ten minutes. Driving on trips my bladder is still the weakest link, but every now and then charging adds a few minutes here and there, sometimes more.

Estimated net average time savings per year over the last four years is about 3-4 hours driving electric instead of ICE. That includes an hour less filling in freezing conditions.

But I digress.

TLDR; Climate is fucked, but EV’s can be good fun. Don’t feel obliged to buy one just yet, wait until it makes sense.

I’m sure co-pilot will be revamped with the newer GPT-models, they’re just not prioritizing it right now.